Fixing Drop Rates in For Honor is Just a Band-Aid That Won't Stop It from Bleeding Out

For Honoris fighting an uphill battle and still very much struggling to remain relevant to its own player base. Whether it's from severe connection issues that have plagued the game since before its launch, thanks in part to Ubisoft's bizarre and terrible P2P netcode which has lead to connectivity and NAT region issues -- to Ubisoft then responding to these issues with nothing but silence -- until only recently.

Which in turn caused their own community to schedule a blackout event in which they would stop playing, simply just to get the attention of the developer.

Since For Honor's launch back in February, positive user reviews on Steam have dropped down to 37% and the negativity and anger of the community isn't calming down any time soon. In that time the developer had attempted to appease the playerbase by attempting to fix drop rates within the game itself in the latest patch... but in my opinion:

It's Ubisoft Putting a Band-Aid on a Fatal Wound

In a Warrior's Den Weekly Livestream on March 21st -- Developer Damien Kieken responded to concerns from the community; including the topic of the drop rate. Notably he had this to say:

“We never had an intention for you to unlock everything in the game.”

Later also mentioned:

“It's like in an RPG -- let's say World of Warcraft, you would never try to unlock everything for all the characters of the whole game. It's the same thing in any MOBA, you're not trying to unlock all the content for all the heroes in your game."

In my opinion I think the developers never imagining someone trying to unlock everything for their characters in For Honor is extremely naive -- but I also believe it's bullshit. I don't believe for a second Ubisoft didn't purposely structure the drop rate for gear and loot in For Honor to be intentionally difficult, it's beyond obvious it was implemented this way from the start to drive players to purchase steel and in turn -- make the developer and publisher lots of money. Which is interesting considering this a full priced $60 game, and yet Ubisoft are utilising a pay structure for cosmetics found within most free-to-play games...

The Ubisoft 2017 Financial Strategy

In fact, the likelihood of a casual player (who maybe only plays a few hours day) unlocking everything for their character is almost impossible, as pointed out by Reddit user bystander007 -- The average hero would require around 91500 steel to unlock every base game unlockable -- excluding upcoming updates and DLC, if you then multiply by that 12 for every character in For Honor, you get a little over a million steel. This is valued at over $700 (on top of the charge of $60-100 for the game itself) to unlock everything.

If you were to attempt to grind this instead -- Reddit user bystander007 estimates this would take anywhere from 326 to 915 days depending on how much you played... but by that point I'm sure we'll already have For Honor 2.

The irony being even if you decided to try and grind for two and a half years, you'll still have to deal with Ubisoft's horrible netcode and the plenty of issues that have already crippled -- or in my opinion fatally wounded this game. Fixes like this aren't going to solve the big issues at hand long term. The Ubisoft medical staff are so incompetent they've placed a band-aid in the form of this “fix” on For Honor which is already bleeding out. While it continues to do so -- stay tuned to GameSkinny for everything For Honor...